gwget barfs on special characters in the filename

[James Harkins]

Binary package hint: gwget

I needed to download a file with some punctuation -- (, ) -- in the filename. Gwget connected to the server okay but then produced an "error: couldn't write to target directory." That was my home directory, so obviously I have permission. The most likely explanation is that the wget command failed because the special characters were not properly escaped.

This was the target file name:

望春风(Hope+spring+breeze+).mp3

And the url:

http://11.dc.ftn.qq.com/ftn_handler/5536efdf72ab854bcf3e7bc4a858b12ea5eaebc67f30b700c28cf53f8baf26f2429ec39c3ace34eccd56ab7a78e0f48bcf173adf58de6625acf2925c73079ddb/%E6%9C%9B%E6%98%A5%E9%A3%8E(Hope+spring+breeze+).mp3?k=6339666470258f99f15a2b4b406604495600505653070f511a0d0352554b025751584b06515f504b060b005200040707530b0251667936abcc8ddcd3814e7e09475c461716145f085019041603034c03171048091655365b&fr=00&&txf_fid=0000000094d4d1971eca4ed5bb49d24e1a3a4b88

(Note, however, that this link will not be valid forever -- download links from qq.com usually expire in a few weeks.)

I can think of a couple of solutions. Both would be good to implement.

1. More rigorous escaping of special characters.

2. Allow the user to input the target filename. Currently the filename is derived from the URL. Maybe the user wants to call the file on disk by another name, but gwget does not support this in any way that I can see.

gwget version 1.0.4-1.1ubuntu0.1